Education: Alfalit, LGM Begin Student Volunteers Program

Alfalit International has begun another phase of its youth’s empowerment by contracting young college students into its student volunteer program.

Program Supervisor George Stewart said Alfalit International’s educational assistance program, which runs under the auspices of the Liberia-Ghana Missions (L-GM), recruited the first batch of 17 university and college students to conduct a rigorous exercise of gathering data and validating the presence of more than 4,000 grade school students in 43 schools in six of the 15 counties.

Stewart said the student volunteers are recruited from the United Methodist University, AME University, Monrovia Bible College, and Starz College of Science and Technology to work for 30 days.

He also said some are assigned as data entry clerks, while others are engaged in data collection from students and their parents.

Stewart said Alfalit-Liberia is upgrading its educational assistance program, while engaging in quality standard and increasing the credibility of its data collection and impact measurement.

“Our program is overwhelmed by its size and the influx of request from individuals and institutions that need our help,” Mr. Stewart added. “The needs are there, but our office has to remain sensitive to impact measurement from direct beneficiaries.”

He said that L-GM is interested, as usual, to pay tuition for students without any condition attached.

“We need to make sure that the direct beneficiaries are impacted by our assistance,” Stewart said.

Alfalit Liberia Executive Director Reverend Emmanuel Giddings cautioned the student volunteers to be professional, transparent and committed to working with the schools for quality results that should satisfy donor standards.

“We are trying to not only sponsor your college education but also to expose you to our culture, which is all by itself a gap among young Liberians,” Rev. Giddings said. The student volunteers are beneficiaries of the Liberia-Ghana Missions Educational Assistance Program.

The L-GM is a non-profit human resource Christian charity. The L-GM is funded by Alfalit International in the USA by means of funding from Dr. Joseph Milton, the President of Alfalit International, who was once awarded an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters Degree by the United Methodist University (UMU) in Liberia.

It was established in 2003 by a United Methodist Minister Rev. Giddings on the soil of Ghana, providing educational assistance to about 300 Liberian refugees’ children at the Buduburam Refugee Camp as well as Ghanaian children.

L-GM serves mostly underprivileged, vulnerable children and students who suffer the disadvantage of poverty and limited family support to fund their education. LGM’s intervention extends to individuals, schools that cater to students in very poor communities, as well as promising school going children and youth who lack the opportunity of continuing their education.

Each year, L-GM sponsors over 6, 000 students in more than 500-grade schools as well as students in nearly every university, college, technical and vocational institution.